The Tom Waits tour mapped to match a constellation of stars
Despite being an artist who made a name for themselves by playing live music in whatever space he could find, Tom Waits’ ability as a live act still somehow flies under the radar.
I’m not kidding about Waits playing any stage he was given, either. Waits played gigs supporting comedians, magicians and even puppet shows in his time. The first ten years of his career were spent living a hard, road-hewn life with a year consisting of ten months touring and two months recording, with barely anything in between. T
The music he made in that time reflected this as well, his early albums being fairly straightforward piano or acoustic guitar-lead singer-songwriter-isms, and his late 1970s records only being slightly more fleshed out, full band, jazz-inflected barroom folk.
Perhaps it is the albums that came after that have prevented people from seeing Waits primarily as a live act. It is, after all, difficult to imagine cuts from Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs going down a treat live and resembling their recorded versions in any way, shape or form.
You can’t build an album around detuned xylophones, rusted sousaphones and that one accordion in all the world that makes a noise like a startled panther if you shake it in the right way, then take it around the rock clubs of the world. Waits knows this intimately as he probably tried to do just that.
Yet, through that whole time, Waits was playing live and delivering some of the best gigs of his whole career as he did. Perhaps that was mainly due to the fact that he never really tried to replicate the sound of his records live and embraced a sort of jazz-esque exploration of them. One that matched his famously strange way of being, which didn’t just extend to the content of said gigs, but the way he promoted them, too.
In 2008, he announced the US leg of his Glitter and Doom tour. At the time of writing, it’s his last tour to date, and he announced it in a way that’s just as surreal and joyous as his music. It was accompanied by writing an extensive interview with himself for NPR. Choice quotes from which include “Q: What are some unusual things that have been left behind in a cloakroom? A: Well, Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ cloakroom and was one-sixteenth Iroquois.”
The main announcement, however, was a staged press conference that was uploaded to YouTube on May 5th. One that saw Waits take a question from a supposed “reporter” which he didn’t answer, but instead revealed that he’d had an affair with their mother back in the 1970s. He also talked through the strange route the tour would take, which Waits attributed to a very simple reason. The route he’d take the tour would match his favourite constellation in the solar system, The Hydra.
He finished up by revealing that the constellation was only half the reason that he’d mapped the tour that way. The other reason was to reveal the acronym ‘Pehdtsckjmba’. Which he said stood for (what else) “People envy happiness, dogs sense courage, knowing jubilation means better ass…sets”.
This is absolutely just Waits having a bit of fun with an otherwise pretty standard bit of tour promotion. Yet the guy has such a colourful way of expressing himself that the chances of him being deadly serious, even with stuff as patently ridiculous as this, are never entirely zero.